I think either there is a God, or we're simply hard wired to believe in one.
This thread is too long to catch up with in one sitting, but you've got it right. Religion is a collection of what Jung calls
archetypes. An archetype is an instinctive belief passed down in our DNA like all instincts.
Archetypes are identifiable by their occurrence in all societies in all eras, with a very low incidence of exception due to mutation. Belief in the supernatural is the fundamental archetype that underlies all religion, but many of the individual motifs widespread in mythologies, such as a dead man or other creature springing back to life, are also archetypes.
Many archetypes are clearly survival traits. The belief most animals are born with to run away from a large animal with both eyes in front of its face--a predator--helps them live long enough to reproduce and pass that instinct down to another generation. Others need a little digging to clarify. The "rite of passage" of testing boys against their ability to withstand pain and hardship has become little more than a twisted ritual in fraternities, lodges and boot camps, but it once prepared young men to help their families survive in a more brutal world.
But anything that is based on DNA can also be purely accidental, the result of genetic drift or a genetic bottleneck. Mitochondrial Eve or Y-Chromosome Adam may have had an odd mutation that caused them to believe in gods, and since only their descendants lived to populate the earth, all of us are now cursed with that instinct.
Fortunately
Homo sapiens has a secret weapon for dealing with instincts that have outlived their usefulness: our uniquely massive forebrain. Alone among vertebrates, we have the power to examine our instincts critically, see that they are atavistic, and consciously override that instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior.
We have done this many times. Like most apes, we have a strong instinct to be pack-social, to live in small groups of pack-mates we have trusted and cared for since birth, regarding other groups as hated and feared competitors for scarce resources. We first experimented with overriding that instinct fifteen thousand years ago when we allowed dogs--"people" we can't even talk to--to join our pack, forming the first multi-species community and using our complementary hunting skills to create the first food surplus the world had ever seen. We followed that with the invention of agriculture, which we could only do by learning to live in harmony and cooperation with people outside our family, in farming villages. Eventually we built cities, overriding our pack-social instincteven further and learning to trust and care for anonymous strangers. Today we have very nearly made a complete transition to a herd-social species, caring about people on the other side of the planet who are nothing but abstractions to us. (My people just overthrew our government by peaceful democratic means because it was killing those people--and we don't even really like them very much but dammit they are our herd-mates.)
I know some of you have probably seen me write this before, but I'm saying it here because it is proof of our colossal ability to override our instincts and do what's right, even if the caveman inside us is grumbling about it.
Perhaps some day we'll be strong enough to override the archetypal instinct of religion. It has outlasted its usefulness by several thousand years and is now a liability that continually threatens to destroy civilization.
If you feel the need to have faith in something, instead of wasting it on mythology, put your faith in mankind's ability to transcend our base nature. Some day we will win out over religion.
